Wednesday, 2 April 2014

Post-PhD life - Life decisions and blogging

I graduated from my PhD some time ago now. I moved away from research when my funding expired and after a lot of decision making and deliberating I took a post in Public Engagement at the University of Aberdeen. I started in late 2012 and I've really been enjoying it so far. I am involved with planning, organising and running lots of public engagement events along with speaking to researchers about the many different ways they can engage with the public, how to bring the public into research, a bit of training and also discussing how to use social media as a researcher (which I really enjoy).

It wasn't an easy decision and I didn't discuss it on this blog at the time for a number of reasons. There was a post-doc opportunity too but that was in Canada and I wanted to stay in Scotland as my (now) husband is based here and I decided that I wanted to move full time into public engagement. I knew that I would enjoy the role and it seemed that this option would lead to a much more secure career (although maybe it won't!) than a temporary post-doc placement.

I've been blogging here on and off but not as often as I was during my PhD. I lost the blogging bug for a while as partly I was incredibly busy and I had a lot of things not related to science, public engagement and blogging going on, some good some not so good. Good stuff included getting married, moving house, job and graduating in quite a short period of time.

I've recently started a new blog, called the science tourist which is a mini travel blog of interesting science places, like Tycho Brahe's observatory on an island in the middle of Denmark and Sweden, and features events taking place in Aberdeen that are related to science. I would love it if some readers of this blog would check that out (and I think some of you will find it interesting!) Some the events I feature and discuss I am now involved with organising. I enjoy going to science events and whenever I travel I seek out interesting places to visit so this new blog is really just bringing together some things that I love and seems quite natural for me.

For the time being I am going to keep this blog going as every now and again I think of things that might be useful for current PhD students and I do some evidence hunting on dodgy scientific claims. I will also post things about public engagement here. I also know that there are still regular visitors to the pages of this blog so it seems silly to remove it.

I've also been doing some chatting via the power of Skype with Errant Science. Standby for that video which is all about reflecting on doing a PhD post-PhD and we are also doing an exciting new thing... a GOOGLE HANGOUT. Please come and talk to us! That is happening on the 9th of April between 7.30 and 9.30 on Google+.

2 comments:

Good to hear what you are doing now. I must admit that I have never regretted moving away from lab work. There are plenty of opportunities to utilise your scientific background without staying in research and what you are doing sounds very worthwhile and enjoyable. I will check out your other blog.